First Build in Years Ended Up Going Quite Well

[Gerowen]

I'm not asking for help or anything, just wanted to share a recent experience I had.  With the release date of Valve's Steam Machine looking uncertain, I decided to just bite the bullet and build my own, while PC parts can still be had.  The last time I built a gaming PC was I believe in 2017.  It had an FX 8370 CPU, 16 GB of DDR3 and an 8 GB RX-480 GPU.  That machine now serves as my homelab server as I've been gaming predominantly on my Steam Deck.  I've put over 200 hours into Elden Ring on my Steam Deck, a lot of that time being docked to our living room TV.  The RX-480 was definitely more powerful in terms of GPU throughput, but that old desktop started falling out of favor when I played thru Final Fantasy 7 Intergrade.  It looked and ran better on the desktop, but for some reason there was an audio glitch with the sound that, after some searching, I found was tied to the FX-8370 CPU not being able to handle the number of audio channels used by that game.  So I played thru the entirety of Intergrade on my Steam Deck, even docking it to the TV on occasion, and since then I've basically been gaming exclusively on my Steam Deck, and my old "gaming" desktop is now acting as a home server, using its GPU to do hardware encoding for Jellyfin.  I also found that my old RX-480 doesn't support "Mesh" shaders, which some games like the new Alan Wake require, so it started becoming an issue not just of horsepower, but of support for newer technologies.  I have a Minisforum UM890 Pro that I had done "some" gaming on, but it runs Debian because I mostly use it for office/work related tasks; video editing, family tree, virtual machines, etc.  As a result, even though it runs games slightly better than the Deck, I can't take advantage of HDR in games with Debian.

So when Valve announced the Steam Machine, I was pretty excited.  The purpose built ease of use of SteamOS coupled with enough horsepower to not have to deal with the blur-fest that 720p becomes when blown up on a 65 inch screen (to be fair, older/classic games still look fine at 720p, but newer games often end up looking like you smeared vaseline on the screen).  Sure some games, like Halo MCC, could run at 1080p or higher when docked and still hold over 60fps, but most games were stuck at 720p if you wanted playable frame-rates.  I was perusing MicroCenter's website out of curiosity when I noticed they had some CPU/RAM/Motherboard combos for some wild deals, and the more I looked at those, coupled with the uncertainty around the release window for the Steam Machine, the more I was thinking about just building my own, so last Saturday I did exactly that.  I packed up the wife and kids, made the 3 hour trip (so 6 hours of driving round trip) to our nearest MicroCenter in Sharonville, Ohio and picked out the parts to build my own.

I had never actually been to a Micro Center.  The last time I was in a store like it was when I lived in Washington and my mom asked me to build her a PC, probably 15 years ago, and I visited a Fry's Electronics.  But, they had plenty of guys hanging around the "build your own" area, so I grabbed one, went over what my goal was (1080p, max settings, 60fps with every current/modern game) and gave him a budget of $2,000.  He got me in just slightly over budget, but that included a $250 build fee and a warranty.  It was actually a pretty great experience because I explained to him I wanted minimal RGB.  I don't mind an indicator light here or there to tell me something is on and working, but I don't want a rave under my TV when I'm sitting in the dark with headphones on trying to focus on Resident Evil or Elden Ring or something.  He took what I said, went around the store and picked out everything for me, showed me what he got and I think he did a great job.  I was able to disable the POST LED on the motherboard in the UEFI settings so that once the system boots successfully it goes off and the only light on the whole thing is a little glowing "Gigabyte" logo on the side of the graphics card, which I've found to not be a distraction since it's relatively small and dimmed considerably by being behind smoke colored tempered glass.

I also knew Micro Center would build it for you, but $250 just felt kinda steep, especially since I was told it would "probably" be done within 4 hours and I had to drive 3 more hours after that to get back home.  Plus the build fee doesn't include the extended warranty.  So even though I initially agreed to both, I kept thinking about it and by the time I got to the checkout I just took the extended warranty and build fee off, brought it all home and built it myself.  It took me a little longer than expected, but there were several things I really appreciated about the newer build.  For one, the modular power supply made cable management much easier.  With the LianLi case I had a huge hidden cavity in the back beside the power supply, especially once I removed the 3.5" drive bays I'm not going to use, so I basically had to do zero management since all I had was power cables for CPU, 24 pin motherboard connector, and the GPU.  Every other power supply cord just got left in the box.  Also, the front panel headers are now all in a big connector instead of being a wad of individual pins I had to manually poke onto pins while referencing the pinout chart in the motherboard manual.

Having an LGA socket was a little stress inducing, as I'd heard horror stories about both the sensitive socket pins, and things not working properly if you don't apply enough pressure to the socket, but the ASUS "TUF GAMING" motherboard retention thing actually seemed to apply quite a lot of pressure downward on the CPU so I've had no issues and everything has worked fine so far and stayed plenty cool.  I even had my wife film me removing the cover plate from the socket for the first time in case it had bent pins out of the box.  I am keeping an eye on things with where I've placed the PC, since it doesn't have a ton of room to breathe, but I ran Prime95 and such on it for a long time and the CPU stayed above base clock and never hit 70 celsius, even crammed into the hole I've got it in, so I think we're good on thermals, probably because there's just so much open air in the case.

I did make one mistake though.  I either forgot in the time it's been since I've last built a PC, or this motherboard is special, but since I only had two RAM sticks, but this motherboard has 4 slots, I was supposed to use slots 2 and 4, but I used slots 1 and 3 to start and everything powered on but wouldn't post, so I started fearing issues with the CPU mounting pressure or something, but upon reading the manual I found a little chart showing me my error.

I also wasn't sure which direction the CPU fans blew since they didn't come mounted to the cooler, so I actually just turned it on and held them up to feel the movement and oriented them to exhaust towards the rear of the case.

After that though, everything has worked great.  I even wore an anti-static wrist strap and used my iFixit toolkit to do the build like a noob.  After I got to POST I went ahead and enabled EXPO for the RAM to get it up to its labeled 6,000 MT/s speed, disabled the internal GPU to free up some system RAM, verified the case and CPU fan profiles were set to sane defaults and installed ChimeraOS.  The longest part after the build was actually just installing our games, migrating our emulators and save data from the Minisforum desktop we had been using, etc.

The build I ended up going with ran me a little over $1,700 and included the following:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
GPU: Gigabyte AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT GAMING Overclocked Triple Fan 16GB
Motherboard: ASUS B650E-E TUF GAMING WIFI
Power Supply: MSI MAG A850GL PCIE5 850 Watt 80 Plus Gold ATX Fully Modular
RAM: G.Skill Flare X5 Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR5-6000
Case: Lian Li O11 DYNAMIC MINI V2 Flow Tempered Glass ATX Mid-Tower
CPU Cooler: Thermalright Peerless Assassin 140
SSD: Crucial P510 2TB SSD G9 TLC NAND PCIe Gen 5 x4

Total out-the-door cost was $1,746.28 .

The CPU/Motherboard/RAM was a combo deal that brought the price down.

They had combo deals for the 9800 X3D and the 9950 X3D, but I decided to stick with the 7800 because I figured it was plenty fast enough and if I started adding $100 here, $100 there because a certain part was "only" $100 more, the next thing you know I would have gone way over the $2k I was trying to stay under.  Initially the tech had picked out a 9070xt GPU and a 9950 X3D combo, but that put me over the $2k by itself, not including taxes and the at-the-time agreed to build fee, so we brought everything down a notch.

Since putting it together we've been playing the daylights out of it.  I've been playing the Resident Evil 4 remake and Elden Ring mostly, all at max settings, 1080p and it looks and runs great.  My wife has been using it to emulate a certain game where animals live on an island together and have to pay off their debt to a landlord, and it'll also get used on weekends for our family game night to play "LEGO Party" and such.  I went thru the RE4 settings and maxed everything except I turned off the motion blur and it has just been sitting at the native 120fps of my living room TV, so I feel like I've got loads of headroom since I'm gaming at 1080p.

This has been a great experience honestly because not only does it mean my games look a LOT better on the big screen, but it means I can leave my Steam Deck dedicated to just playing in handheld mode.  This hasn't been a huge issue, but there are some games that support the Deck's native 800p, but then when you dock it to a 16:9 television they revert to 720p, and when you go handheld again stay at 720p, leaving black bars above and below the image on the 16:10 screen on the Deck itself until you manually go change it back to 800p.  So there were more than a couple games where if I played docked and handheld, I had to manually set the resolution every time I changed modes.  With this desktop it means we can have a powerful dedicated living room gaming experience and a great handheld one on our Steam Decks.  I did tinker with 4k and the couple games I tried ran fine at max settings, 4k, but they couldn't all hold 60fps (Elden Ring for example, at max settings, 4k, was getting about 50fps in slightly more resource intensive DLC area), so I decided that, to reduce the amount of babysitting and game-by-game tweaking I have to do, I just set the OS resolution, and by extension the resolution reported to all my games, to 1080p120.  That gives me a great looking image with enough headroom to keep settings cranked and still hold over 60fps.

Oh one other side-note, I discovered that, at least with ChimeraOS on this specific motherboard, the system wakes over USB.  Since my XBox controllers are paired to an official USB dongle and not via Bluetooth, turning on one of the XBox controllers will wake the system from sleep.  That does mean it doesn't wake with my Dualsense controller which uses bluetooth, but turning on our mini keyboard or an XBox controller wakes it from sleep just like a console, 

If anybody would like to follow me on Steam, my profile is at: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gerowen/

Edited February 28 by Gerowen

[Gerowen]

As an aside, I "was" going to get a 4 TB NVME drive, but that's one component where they didn't seem to have any deals or bundles available, at least at that time, and the cost of NVME is outrageous right now.  The last time I bought an NVME drive was last year I grabbed a 4 TB WD Black with a set of speakers to use with my "work" mini PC, and it ran me $360 for both items.  The drive by itself at that time was $280.  Now, that exact same drive, for sale at the same item page/link on Newegg, is $630.

February 2025

February 2026

Edited February 28 by Gerowen

[Som]

On 28/02/2026 at 20:56, Gerowen said:

As an aside, I "was" going to get a 4 TB NVME drive, but that's one component where they didn't seem to have any deals or bundles available, at least at that time, and the cost of NVME is outrageous right now.  The last time I bought an NVME drive was last year I grabbed a 4 TB WD Black with a set of speakers to use with my "work" mini PC, and it ran me $360 for both items.  The drive by itself at that time was $280.  Now, that exact same drive, for sale at the same item page/link on Newegg, is $630.

February 2025

February 2026

yep, unfortunately it'll be like that , or worse , for the next year or even longer. crap time to buy pc components 

[Gerowen]

On 28/02/2026 at 16:29, Som said:

yep, unfortunately it'll be like that , or worse , for the next year or even longer. crap time to buy pc components 

The SSD was the 2nd most expensive single part in the whole build; only the GPU beat it.  I was debating on waiting and finally just decided that, if I'm gonna spend a grand, or close to it, on a Steam Machine, I might as well spend a little more and get something more powerful, more customize-able, etc.  Now, if I decide at some point in the next 7 years or so that it's not powerful enough, upgrading the CPU or GPU will be an easy upgrade.

[Gerowen]

Went ahead and gave it a little test run with Furmark and Prime95, if for no other reason than to make sure the spot I've got it sitting isn't going to get saturated and cause thermal issues.  It seems like it'll be just fine.

Video link: https://cloud.marcusandash.net/s/BENe2CcCjo66HAY

Note: That link expires in 30 days.

[Astra.Xtreme]

Are all 5 of the case fans oriented as intakes?  If so, you may want to consider repositioning the 2 that are in the middle (and leave the bottom 3 as-is).

Rearrange those 2 to be exhaust fans; one at the back to assist with pulling air out of the CPU, and one at the top to pull out rising hot air.  Then you'll have 3 intake fans and 2 exhaust fans, which gives you ideal positive pressure.

https://www.xda-developers.com/pc-airflow-guide/

[Gerowen]

On 02/03/2026 at 12:33, Astra.Xtreme said:

Are all 5 of the case fans oriented as intakes?  If so, you may want to consider repositioning the 2 that are in the middle (and leave the bottom 3 as-is).

Rearrange those 2 to be exhaust fans; one at the back to assist with pulling air out of the CPU, and one at the top to pull out rising hot air.  Then you'll have 3 intake fans and 2 exhaust fans, which gives you ideal positive pressure.

https://www.xda-developers.com/pc-airflow-guide/

Yeah they are all 5 oriented as intake, so I've got positive pressure right now, however little that might be with as many open spaces as there are elsewhere, and I oriented the CPU fans to suck air in from the front and exhaust towards the rear of the case.  But rearranging them like this might help direct the air where I want it to go.